Housing costs for young people at 50-year high

Young people in Britain are spending three times as much of their earnings on housing costs now compared to 50 years ago, a new report suggests.

The Resolution Foundation says people born between 1926 and 1945 spent just 7% of their average earnings on somewhere to live at the age of 30.
But this has risen to 23% among those born between 1981 and 2000.
The younger generation is also having to make do with longer commutes, less floor space and fewer opportunities to buy their own home compared to their grandparents.
Millennials look set to spend an extra 64 hours a year commuting to work by the time they are 40 in comparison to the baby boomer generation born between 1946 and 1965, according to the report.
Most of them will also have to wait a decade longer than their parents before they are able to afford their own house.

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“Britain’s housing catastrophe has been 50 years in the making but while its effects are widespread it is millennials who are truly at the sharp end,” says Resolution Foundation Senior Policy Analyst, Lindsay Judge.
“For older generations, at least rising housing costs have been accompanied by improvements in the quality and security of housing, as more families have been able to own their home.

“The big danger today is that young people are having to settle for lower quality, longer commutes and less security in order to afford a place to live, despite spending a record share of their income of housing.”
The availability of housing in Britain has become a key issue in political debate, with a succession of politicians promising to end the UK’s housing crisis.

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It’s thought at least 250,000 new homes need to be built per year in the UK in order to keep up with demand.
The Conservative manifesto ahead of June’s snap election promised to deliver one million homes by the end of 2020, with a further 500,000 by the end of 2022, while Labour had pledged to construct around a million homes over the same period.
Ever-increasing house prices are also contributing to the problem, leaving many unable to afford to get on to the housing ladder.
Government data shows that the average UK home now costs £226,185 – an increase of 5% on the year before – while wage growth has remained static at an annual rate of 2.1%.